Cable Beats DSL For Average Speed

zymano writes "CNET article here says cable modems are 50 percent faster on average than DSL connections which I think most have suspected . There are some connection rates that i found interesting like Cablevision reportedly having the fastest connections, averaging 800kbps, or 13kbps above the industry average. Mentions other cable company speeds. TimeWarner cable was not tested."

Comments

Re:Not Always True

[Cyberdyne]

Since cable in our area has a shared backbone for neighbourhood segments, that means that cable in my area is a lot slower than DSL. With Kazaa running all the time on almost all of the machines, I end up getting a faster connection for a lower price.

Yes, cable's more vulnerable to that - although with DSL, you're still sharing the backhaul pipe from the DSLAM to the ISP, and of course all the ISP's customers are sharing the ISP's pipe(s) to the rest of the Net. The tradeoff is that cable has much more bandwidth to share.

In theory, with some clever traffic shaping, you could give "interactive" users the full bandwidth of the pipe (in short burts) - so when you view a webpage, it arrives at many megabits/sec. Then after, say, the first megabyte (a fraction of a second at full bandwidth for a cable segment), start throttling back to the "bulk download" rate. That could give insanely fast interactive performance (even really bloated webpages would appear in a flash, if the remote server can manage it) without taking the financial hit of Kazaa users eating a couple of Mbps 24x7.

P2P is, as you say, a huge problem on cable segments (and on DSL: it's still shared once you reach the exchange); one user running Kazaa can easily eat the bandwidth of a few dozen "normal" users. Either the ISP has to buy a load more bandwidth to cope (and a massive price hike to cover it), or do something to stop them: traffic shaping, ban it (and enforce that ban), or impose traffic quotas.

IPs, routes and speed.

[kriegsman]

If you're running a server and need a static IP address, or multiple IP addresses, you need DSL (or ISDN, or a T-1, or *gasp* dedicated dialup -- don't ask.)

On the other hand, if what you want is the highest possible download speed for the lowest price (Kb per sec per dollar per month), cable is the way to go.

I know a few server-at-home geeks who actually have both DSL and cable: DSL for the static IPs for their servers, and cable for surfing. I'm thinking about going this way myself. The really interesting project will be setting up a dual-homed box to do intelligent routing of traffic across the DSL with the static IP and the (presumably faster) cable modem with the dynamic IP.

-Mark

Re:Latency

[Motherfucking Shit]

You bring up a good point in latency. I think latency and throughput are - at least in the current state of residential broadband in the US - mutually exclusive; the DSL providers tend to give you awesome pings but low caps, the cable companies give you less conservative caps but the pings aren't as hot. You choose your connection for one or the other. I chose throughput.

From RoadRunner (Time Warner) Midsouth, to one of the Ultima Online game servers I play:

$ ping -c5 greatlakes.owo.com
PING central-ae6.owo.com (159.153.226.29): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=0 ttl=52 time=39.161 ms
64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=36.583 ms
64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=2 ttl=52 time=35.448 ms
64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=38.382 ms
64 bytes from 159.153.226.29: icmp_seq=4 ttl=52 time=40.056 ms

--- central-ae6.owo.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 35.448/37.926/40.056/1.686 ms

Having read the UO message boards for a long time, it seems like DSL users tend to get slightly better pings (averaging 15-20ms, I've seen some on speakeasy who claim pings of 5ms). However, I'm perfectly able to compete with my latency. I'd rather have a 40ms ping average to game, and also be able to download at 250KB/sec.

It really depends on what you use your connection for the most, and how you prioritize those uses. Someone who is generally a casual uploader/downloader but does a ton of gaming might be better off with DSL, for the apparent latency boost. Someone like me, who enjoys gaming but spends a lot of time uploading and downloading as a coder/sysadmin is better off with cable and its apparent throughput boost.

For me, it boils down to the work side of things. I have (among others) one mysqldump that's over 900 megs, which I download 3 times a week to maintain as an offsite backup[1]. There are a number of other dumps I download for backup purposes as well, probably totalling 500+ megs in their own right. When it comes to downloading 900 megs - or especially a gig and a half - there's a noticeable difference between a 150KB/s download cap and a 250KB/s download cap. I can give up a few lag-deaths in Ultima Online now and then as a tradeoff to getting my "important" file transfers faster.

At the risk of sounding like a Time Warner apologist (I have a rather botched history with AOL, so believe me I'm no fan) I have to say that cable has always been more appealing to me than DSL. Then again, I've always been more concerned with how fast I can download ;)

Just my two cents.

[1] Yeah, I'm probably one of those hated "power users" from the cableco's standpoint. `ipfw show` claims ~32 gigs in 24 days uptime, but until I hear any complaints, I figure I'll use the broadband I pay for.